I am trying to install Mint 14 Cinnamon 64-bit and all goes well until the boot loader install, which fails. I am trying to install on a 512GB Samsung 830 SSD. Also happen to have a Samsung 830 256GB installed and it will not take the boot loader either. There are also two 1GB regular hard drives in the system that I use for data storage. My system specs should be in my signature, but the motherboard is an Asus Sabertooth X79. I have the SSD drives plugged into the SATA 6 ports and NOT the SSD caching since I don't understand what those are for. This motherboard does have the dreaded Secure Boot functionality, but it is disabled in the BIOS. Also NOT using UEFI. Am trying to dual-boot with Windows 8.

I'm not sure why your having problems with grub but you might want to try going to the page below and downloading and running boot-repair it will give you and error log of the grub install that can lead to a solution if it does not fix the problem.good luck Dave https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair

I think I got a bad burn on my DVD. I finally got the system to see the hard drive (boot settings in the BIOS), but now my login doesn't work after an apparently successful install and first boot.

Will try again tomorrow. This is really frustrating, especially since I installed Mint on my laptop earlier today from the same disc and it went without a hitch and works great. *shrugs* Baffled and tired...